Yogurt is often marketed as a healthy food.
However, the sugar and flavorings added to many yogurts can make them more like junk food.
For this reason, navigating the yogurt aisle of your grocery store can be confusing.
Always Read the Label
Reading the label should always be your first step when deciding what food to buy.
This is because reading the label is essential to knowing what is really in your food.
On the outside, it may seem like all yogurts are the same. However, if you know what to look for, the label on each yogurt can tell a different story.
Ingredients List
Although all yogurts start out as plain yogurt, they often contain a variety of added ingredients, such as sugar, artificial flavors, dyes, stabilizers and preservatives.
When possible, choose a yogurt without large amounts of added ingredients. Instead, try to choose a yogurt with few ingredients.
They should include milk, the bacterial cultures used to turn milk into yogurt and not much else.
Ingredients are listed by weight, so avoid yogurts that have sugar listed near the top.
Better yet, simply avoid all yogurts that have any type of added sugar on the ingredients list.
Sugar can be listed under a number of different names including sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, fruit juice, cane sugar and agave nectar.
Nutrition Facts
The nutrition facts on the label can give you some of the most specific information.
The serving size and calories per serving are listed at the top. The nutrition facts can also tell you how many carbs, fat, protein and sugar are in each serving.
Note that there may be more than one serving per container, meaning there are more calories too.
Right now, the nutrition label does not distinguish added sugar from naturally occurring sugar, which can make it difficult to tell how much sugar has been added.
However, labeling guidelines have recently changed so that the grams of added sugar per serving will also be listed on labels in the future.
The nutrition information will also tell you how much calcium and vitamin D each yogurt serving contains.
Ideally, your yogurt will contain vitamin D and a significant part of your daily calcium needs. This will be listed as percentage of daily value (% DV) on the label.
Avoid Added Sugar
The main culprit that turns yogurt from a healthy food into an unhealthy one is added sugar
It’s estimated that sugar-sweetened beverages are responsible for 40% of that increase. However, processed foods with added sugar, including sweetened yogurts, help contribute to it.
Eating too much sugar can be very damaging to health. Research has linked it to the development of obesity, heart disease, metabolic dysfunction, liver disease and type 2 diabetes, among other problems.
Although yogurt already contains some natural sugar in the form of lactose (milk sugar), food companies often add large amounts of simple sugars to make yogurt taste sweeter.
Plain yogurt typically contains around 10–15 grams of carbs per cup (245 grams), but flavored or sweetened yogurts can easily contain more than 30 grams per serving.
To choose a healthy yogurt, pick the brands with the least sugar per serving. This means as little as possible over the 10–15 grams per cup (245 grams) that is already present from lactose.
Typically, the healthiest choice is plain, unflavored yogurt. But if you don’t like plain yogurt, there are a few things you can do instead.
One option is to sweeten it yourself with your favorite fresh fruit.
You can also make your own chia seed yogurt to make plain yogurt less tart.
Look for Live Cultures
Healthy prebiotic are used to make yogurt. They turn the milk sugar (lactose) into lactic acid, which causes the yogurt to taste sour.
These probiotic bacteria, often referred to as “live cultures” in yogurt, can offer a large number of health benefits.
Although research on probiotics is still in its infancy, studies suggest that they can:
- Improve symptoms of lactose intolerance.
- Stimulate the immune system.
- Significantly reduce symptoms of depression.
- Reduce the risk of antibiotic-associated diarrhea in children and adults.
- Improve symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.
Other studies found that probiotic yogurt could help lower cholesterol body weight and even inflammatory markers.
Eating yogurt with the probioticBifidobacterium has also been shown to improve bowel regularity in children and women.
All yogurts contain these live cultures initially, since they are the ingredient that turns milk into yogurt.
However, the probiotic content of a yogurt can vary greatly depending on a number of factors, including packaging methods and storage conditions.
To get the most benefits from your yogurt, choose one with the most probiotics. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell how much each yogurt contains.
The National Yogurt Association offers a “Live and Active Cultures” seal for yogurts that contain 100 million cultures (bacteria) per gram at the time of testing. The seal looks like this:
Image Source: Fage.
However, getting the seal is expensive. Many brands opt to go without it, even if they do meet the 100 million cultures per gram qualification.
Low-Fat vs Full-Fat
Yogurt can be made from whole, low-fat or fat-free milk.
Health experts often recommend low-fat dairy products because most people already eat more calories than they need.
As a result, most yogurts are made from low-fat or fat-free milk.
However, reduced-fat yogurts typically contain the most sugar, which is added to compensate for the loss of flavor from fat. So if you choose low-fat yogurt, be sure to look for one without added sugar.
When Choosing a Healthy Yogurt, Less Is More
When it comes to yogurt, keeping it healthy means keeping it simple.
Try to pick a yogurt that has few ingredients and as little added sugar as possible. Plain and unsweetened yogurt is best.
Apart from that, most choices are up to personal preference.
As long as you follow these tips, you can feel confident that the yogurt you pick is a healthy and nutritious choice.
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